Alice McDermott Quotes
Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.
The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.
I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.
We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!
Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.
When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.
Scribble out the world since it was not to your liking and make up a new one, something better.
I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.
The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have... But I never did write a play.
It was not about the sea or the sand, but burying her feet there had seemed to cure what had worried her...